Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to error detection and, in particular, to error detection for wormhole routing.
Description of the Related Art
Wormhole routing (wormhole switching) is widely used for packet switching networks because of its low latency compared to store-and-forward routing. In wormhole routing, a packet is divided into flits, and transferred flit-by-flit in a pipelined manner.
However, wormhole routing is not without deficiencies. For example, the links along the routing path are occupied until the whole packet is transferred. Transfer error is detected only at the destination. Thus, if an error occurred during the transfer, then it is preferable to release all the links on the path as soon as possible in order to allow other packets to use them.
Accordingly, there is a need for an error detection mechanism for wormhole routing.